"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Thursday, April 20, 2017

I was just kidding about the "death".....

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, Trump said Xi told him during a recent summit that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.” The comments sparked outrage in Seoul and became an issue in South Korea’s presidential race, prompting the foreign ministry to seek to verify what Xi actually said.

“It’s a clear fact acknowledged by the international community that, for thousands of years in history, Korea has never been part of China,” foreign ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said at a briefing in Seoul on Thursday.

The gob, she is smacked. But, as I said, Trump loved hearing Xi read Trump's own words back to him about the missile strike on Syria as if they were Xi's original sentiments. So this isn't surprising, so much as it is much, much worse. And yes, there is a context, as Josh Marshall provides:

On Wednesday, after it was revealed that the carrier strike group was actually thousands of miles away and had been heading in the opposite direction, toward the Indian Ocean, South Koreans felt bewildered, cheated and manipulated by the United States, their country’s most important ally.

“Trump’s lie over the Carl Vinson,” read a headline on the website of the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo on Wednesday. “Xi Jinping and Putin must have had a good jeer over this one.”

“Like North Korea, which is often accused of displaying fake missiles during military parades, is the United States, too, now employing ‘bluffing’ as its North Korea policy?” the article asked.
…
“The 50 million South Koreans, as well as many common-sensical people around the world, cannot help but feel embarrassed and shocked,” said Youn Kwan-suk, spokesman of the main opposition Democratic Party, which is leading in voter surveys before the May 9 presidential election.

And yes, Trump really did say what he's reported to have said:

He then went into the history of China and Korea. Not North Korea, Korea. And you know, you’re talking about thousands of years …and many wars. And Korea actually used to be a part of China. And after listening for 10 minutes I realized that not — it’s not so easy. You know I felt pretty strongly that they have — that they had a tremendous power over China. I actually do think they do have an economic power, and they have certainly a border power to an extent, but they also — a lot of goods come in. But it’s not what you would think. It’s not what you would think.

So here we are, making America Great Again, and putting America First. And it's working out almost precisely as predicted; or at least as foreseen.

3 Comments:

Learn-something-new-every-day Department: A coupla years back I bought a History of Korea (by Jinwung Kim) that I've never gotten around to starting. Interestingly, at the end of the second chapter, on the period of the Three Kingdoms, 57 BC to AD 676, from pp. 77 to 83, there is a subchapter titled "A 'History War' with China," wherein is detailed recent Chinese academic claims, not pre-dating 2000, that the ancient Korean kingdoms were in fact provinces of Chinese kingdoms.

The truth of it I'm certainly not in a position to judge. Interesting, though, how Xi was able to sucker Trump into weighing on what is apparently an active and very sensitive controversy between China and the Koreas.